One ringy-dingy

I don't like the telephone, and the past decade of innovations have
just annoyed me more. The idea of everyone having a combination
pocketcomputer and Star Trek
communicator would once have seemed
brilliant to me; but now it all seems about as interesting and glamorous
as everyone carrying around a fist-sized can of Lysol, and only slightly
more useful.

Bruce Sterling wrote the following in 1988, about a character who
had something basically like one of these "hands-free" cellphone
attachments we have now:

«He kept mumbling[...], shaking his head and talking into the
air. Like a madman. It was odd how peculiar it looked when you
weren't doing it yourself.»

Here on my island off the coast of America, I have started seeing more
people than usual walking down the street while gesturing madly into
the air and talking to the ground a few feet ahead.
And around here, only the slightest cues of dress distinguish the
moneyed and secure from the unemployably insane. So it's always great
fun to keep and eye out to see whether that passerby's urgent
conversation about "and I said I gotta get on with my life!!" is
directed toward a tiny black plastic headset in their other ear, or
toward the less electronically mediated voices in their head.

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